175. A wife cannot take on the activities proper to a man, nor on the other hand a man the activities proper to a wife, because they differ like wisdom and the love of it, or like thought and an affection for it, or like intellect and an inclination toward it. The activities that belong to men particularly have to do with intellect, thought, and wisdom, while the functions that belong to women particularly have to do with will, feeling, and love. A wife performs her duties with these as a starting point, and a man starts from those other abilities. So their activities are different by nature. Still they are interlinked.
Many people think that women can do men's jobs if only they are started in them at an early age, like boys. They can be introduced to the practice of the jobs but not the judgment that the correctness of the work depends on inwardly. On this account, women who have been introduced to men's functions are obliged to consult men in matters of judgment, and then if the decision is up to them they choose from the men's advice what favors their own love.
Some people also say that women are as able as men to raise the sight of their intellect into the areas of light that men participate in and see into things on that same level — an opinion induced on them through writings of certain learned authoresses. But these writings, examined in the spiritual world, with the authoresses present, turn out not to involve judgment and discernment but ingenuity and eloquence. And the products of these two skills seem as if they are lofty and erudite from elegance and polish in the composition of sentences — but only to people who call all cleverness wisdom.
Men cannot undertake the activities that belong to women and do them right, either, because they do not have women's dispositions, which are totally different from men's dispositions.
It is because the masculine sex's inclinations and perceptions are so different, from creation and therefore by nature, that this was among the statutes given to the Children of Israel: that a man's clothing must not be on a woman nor a woman's clothing on a man, because this is an abomination. (Deuteronomy 22:5) The reason was that everyone in the spiritual world dresses according to his disposition, and the two different dispositions of woman and man can only be united between two people, and never in one person.
